Orcas

Morr; 2012

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The question isn't why Thomas Meluch (aka Benoît Pioulard) and Rafael Anton Irisarri decided to work together; it's what took them so long. While Meluch's music often resembles an amnesiac crooner making up karaoke lyrics for Boards of Canada instrumentals, and Irisarri splits the difference between Harold Budd and Gas (trending post-minimal under his own name and electronic as the Sight Below), both of them freely muddle up ambient, classical, electronic, and pop idioms in search of the ideal blend of melodic immediacy and formal opacity. And they've been moving in the same interlocked circles for years, recording for most of the bigger labels that steward this furtive electro-acoustic stuff: Kranky and Type (Pioulard), Room40 and Miasmah (Irisarri), and Ghostly International (both). Ticking another one off the list, they join forces as Orcas for this modest, entrancing Morr Music debut, which sounds in reality exactly how it sounds on paper: nocturnal ambient pop in the manner of Eluvium's Similes, if Similes had benefited from the same rugged grandeur as Copia.

The most distinctive and consistent feature of Meluch's music is his sedate yet expressive voice, which moves like something heavy underwater, complacently drowning ("Like coming up for air," he intones repeatedly on the hesitantly skipping "Pallor Cedes"). Irisarri, meanwhile, builds elegantly decaying, chiaroscuro mosaics that seethe with electronic processing. These modes integrate naturally-- in fact, they seem to fill each other's absences. Meluch and Irisarri encase sad, twinkling pop songs for piano or guitar in slow, shuddering masses of electronic sound, striking a fine balance between lyric-driven emotional appeals and aloof abstractions. In either case, Meluch's voice is rightly the focal point, whether atomized into a hissing glow or lucidly double-tracked into streaked harmony, recalling Grizzly Bear at their duskiest-- especially on standout "Arrow Drawn", whose cunning melodic pleasures insinuate themselves slowly, which makes them last.

There are more immediate highs as well, such as "Until Then", a frugal Broadcast cover for close-miked piano and dirty stylus, and "Carrion", a grainy, blossoming hymn. Whether menaced by growling distortion, enshrined in gusty reverb, or draped over an unadorned guitar, Meluch's tender, isolated singing is a stable fulcrum for the music's pendulous swing between extreme, gentle inertia and sudden, violent flux. This type of collaboration between experimental pop musicians can too often devolve into aimless fancywork and tech shenanigans, but Meluch and Irisarri have crafted a genuine, coherent album that conjures immense shadows and immense depths worthy of its namesake.